introverts | IFS with Andrea

The 1980s had dozens of television commercials about the benefits of phone calls. They could save you a trip to a closed business, start a pep talk with a family member, or get caught up with a friend. Some were from the yellow pages companies, some were from the local phone companies. Most featured tag or jingle lines like, “phone first!” or “reach out and touch someone” or “just call”. Even now with the ubiquity of smartphones, you can still save time calling ahead. Even with Yelp and Google and the businesses’ own website . . . the hours still could be wrong. But it’s more than that; it’s not just the avoidance of wasted time.

Introverts hate picking up the phone. Often, it’s a hate with fiery and sweaty-palmed passion. Same thing for the shy, the awkward, and those on the autism spectrum. This means about 30% of the population would rather risk being wrong or missing a crucial piece of communication than making a phone call.

But here’s the thing. Introverts also dislike spending more time than needed on interactions with people. If I do not call that auto repair place because they are open for another hour on their Google listing and when I arrive they are about to close, I now have to interact with THEM, as well as the next place on the list.

This does not just apply to business hours. This is even more important in business RELATIONSHIPS. At work, the difference between picking up the phone and writing an email is so night and day that extroverts laugh at our silliness and reluctance to talk to a human.

And after decades in the workforce, it is still hard to remember that one 10-minute phone call can prevent hours and dozens of emails. Not to mention you now have a “face” to that other person and they are far more likely to work with you in the future. Why is that? Because most of the time the person that I (and you) need to call is an extrovert. They wouldn’t be in that sales or marketing position if they were not. So they LOVE phone calls. They EXPECT phone calls. For them, that’s all well and good.

For us, they’re a necessary hurdle in our quest for efficacy in life. See it this way: the more times you pick up the phone, the less time needed for carefully worded interactions in the future. And possibly less time needed for interactions AT ALL with that person in the future. So for an introvert, that’s a win.

So here’s the big, magical toolkit/tip/hack: MAKE THE CALL.

This tip was written with business in mind, but it applies 110% to personal relationships as well. THAT might be another post for another time.

The second time I passed the parked car on my daily run, I mustered up the courage to look inside. I wondered if I would see cold white skin and sunken cheeks and eyes that no longer saw. Instead, what I saw was a middle-aged man, reading a book. “Well, that’s interesting”, I thought. Then I started paying attention more often to these parked cars. The details varied, but the underlying behavior was the same: individual people getting some “me time” in the City of Angels.

A City of Cars

My apartment for the previous 3 years is smack dab in the middle of a gentrifying neighborhood in one of the most stereotypically in-love-with-cars cities on the planet: Los Angeles. This city is a stupendous mish-mash of roadways, from Euro-narrow two-lanes that are functionally one-lanes because everyone parks on both sides, to 33% grade nail-biters (Los Angeles has 4 of the top 10 steepest streets in the country, beating out San Francisco’s TWO!), to avenues in old residential areas wide enough for four lanes. We residents of Los Angeles get to experience everything, along with traffic and parking issues aplenty.

Yes, this is a two-lane street. Theoretically. Make sure your backing up skillz are solid.

Finally, I started noticing people in their cars. Not stuck in traffic. Not cruising along in the HOV lane. But alone, parked. First, I just figured it was slightly sketchy. Maybe it’s someone passed out? Or . . . DEAD?! But then I really started LOOKING. Impolitely, perhaps, but looking nonetheless. Like I described above, the situations I saw were NOT the “skeevy looking person passed out in car” or worse. I saw all kinds of people, all ages, all kinds of cars. On any kind of street. In parks. On busy streets. On quiet streets. Before school. In the middle of the afternoon. At dusk. A young professional woman. A man in a sport coat. An older lady listening to the radio. An adult with a book. Another adult with a book. So many books. What is going on?

Consider The Introvert

First, consider the introvert. One-quarter to a third of humans are predominantly introverted, according to the few sites I could find with some semblance of an estimate. This means a few things, personality-wise. For example, introverts feel less energetic after interacting with others, and feel replenished after some alone or non-social time. It also tends to mean that reflection on internal subjects (analysis, philosophy, writing) is more interesting to an introvert. For comparison, engaging with the outside world (conversations, team sports, parties) is natural to the extrovert and it energizes them.

For reasons above, living alone is preferable to many introverts, but this can come at a price to one’s social life and personal growth. But it can also come at a literal price: in Los Angeles, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment recently crossed $2000. That’s more than 90% of the take home pay for the median per-capita income of $30K per year (which is 25K after taxes).

Compare Los Angeles to another “large-ish” city nearby: Las Vegas. This desert metropolis has a population of 600,000 people. There you’ll find warm weather, ample entertainment, and 1046 currently available 1-bedroom apartments under $1250. Of those, 608 are $1000 or less per month.

Back to Los Angeles, with a city population of 3.8 million people (6x that of Las Vegas). Within those city boundaries, you’ll find warm weather, ample entertainment, and a grand total of 33 one-bedroom apartments available for $1250 or less. Of those, how many are under $1000? Technically, two: rooms in boarding houses of about 120 sq ft. So, that means ZERO.

How do people manage to live here, at all? The answer is simple: roommates. Sometimes, lots of roommates. Heck, the apartment listings here might seem not so bad when looking for that rare $1000-$1200 find, until you realize that every single ad you open up is actually a room in someone’s house or apartment. There are many scams out there, as well. Most apartment seekers just ignore anything that seems like a deal because it’s likely to be misleading or flat out not legit.

Me Time in Your Own Private Heaven: Your Car

Remember all those people? Just chilling out in their cars for no apparently urgent reason? The more I thought about it and the things they were doing—napping, eating, reading, smoking, listening to music—it dawned on me. They are INTROVERTING.

When an introvert works with people and lives with people and is surrounded by people people people, what can you do in a few extra minutes of time each day to keep your sanity? There’s no time to be going up into the mountains or checking into a hotel, or taking WAAAAY too long in the private bathroom at work? You get your solo time in your car. It’s safe, it’s yours, and you can take it anywhere. In New York, car and parking costs might be just too much for this to be an option, but in Los Angeles I believe that solo car occupancy is one way that inward-oriented folks are filling a psychological need. They’re keeping themselves sane, and, in a way, performing a necessary public good.

It’s an inefficient solution, to be sure, with traffic and smog and all of that. But it’s a solution to ponder. I do.